Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | September 21, 2025
AP Photo/Rick Scuteri

There is a certain amount of unconscious hypocrisy that is normal in human beings. Hypocrisy, after all, is the "homage that vice gives to virtue." We all have our vices, and he who is without sin may cast the first stone and all that. 

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So when people are unconsciously hypocritical--engage in minor sins which they claim to abhor--we normally just roll our eyes at how unself-reflective they are. 

But then there is the kind of hypocrisy that makes your head explode--people demanding one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else. 

It is the latter with which we are afflicted in the Jimmy Kimmel debate.

Kimmel was an enthusiastic participant in the cancellation wars, and his employer, Disney, has been engaging in cancellations for years, particularly with regard to conservatives. Gina Carano, anybody? Rosanne Barr? Kimmel joked about those, you know, and was quite happy to see "Consequence Culture" take its toll. 

As has just about every liberal in the world, who has celebrated the deplatforming and censorship of conservatives for years. The Biden administration spent billions subsidizing censorship NGOs, spent countless hours bullying social media companies to ban conservatives, and every time they got a scalp, they denied it was censorship because the agent who cut off the access to the media was technically a private company. 

Now that Jimmy Kimmel has been suspended, everything has changed. Not a little, but by 180 degrees. We are getting essays written about how even a hint of government criticism might lead to a private company censoring itself, and that would be wrong. 

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Really?

Now, of course, conservatives can be hypocrites too, and many are vulnerable to that charge when it comes to the cancellation binge going on right now, where conservatives are trying to take out every liberal who celebrated Charlie's death. I think the accusation of hypocrisy is half true, but only half true. 

Here's why: almost everybody who is engaged in this frenzy also warned liberals that they would do so when the opportunity arose as retaliation for the decade-long cancellation spree from the left. 

In game theory, that is called the "tit for tat" strategy, and it is the only strategy that wins. Everybody plays by the same rules, or everybody loses. 

It is the logic of mutually assured destruction. It is an ugly logic, but it also kept us out of a thermonuclear war for the past 80 years, and if the goal is to find a detente after the current hatred simmers down, the hypocritical actions were necessary. If, instead, this is just one more step down the path where everybody's behavior just gets worse, we are doomed. 

As for doomed...you have to wonder about the condition of many liberals' souls...

As I keep insisting, most liberals do not have black souls. They genuinely believe the people they are allied with really do want peace, love, harmony, and a better world. They did not celebrate Charlie Kirk's death, although they probably believe the Pravda spin that Charlie hated women, gays, and puppies and kept his wife barefoot and pregnant (obviously, they have zero knowledge about either Charlie or Erika).

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But how many of these good people went onto Facebook in the days after Charlie's assassination and read their friends' comments celebrating Charlie's death? Did it wake them up? 

Some yes, some no. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. Already, there is a creeping narrative that the celebrations never happened, or that they were a tiny fringe of nobodies, and bots, not doctors, surgeons, teachers, military officers, professors, and even Democratic Party politicians. 

Soon, we will be told that Russia did it. It bears all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation, right?

Ideally, we get back to a place where we can talk with each other, debate, and openly speak our minds without fear of complete destruction. No more censorship, debanking, witch hunts, or the like. That is what civil society is supposed to look like. What we have now is a cold-ish civil war, although conservatives rightly fear that they have literal targets painted on their backs.

If the current round of cancellations is a strategic tit-for-tat one-off, then it is distasteful but perhaps necessary to reestablish deterrence. If it is the beginning of a new round of suppression from the right, count me out. 

I still believe that people in positions of authority--doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, academics, and the like--can't be in those positions while admitting that they are willing to use their power to harm others. That is just professional hygiene, and one of the reasons why the credentials aren't handed out like confetti, and we make many of them swear oaths to professional codes of conduct. 

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But most people must be free to spout off without any consequences other than the natural social opprobrium that attaches to being a jerk. 












































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